The Key to Making Cybersecurity Fit How Employees Work

People are constantly switching between devices – whether it is for reading personal emails, paying bills, or downloading sales reports, and are accustomed to managing their personal and professional life from any location.

Users frequently swap between personal and business devices or even blur the lines between the two, which is well known to cybercriminals. Industries have experienced enormous convenience and productivity gains due to cloud technologies, but when people utilize these devices, they expose their organizations to possible threats and attacks.

The issue is that cybersecurity is entangled in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game. Once a breach is identified, a patch is created, and the cycle is repeated. The answer isn’t to throw more people at the issues, especially in an industry that has millions of unfilled job openings.

Added Layers of Assurance 

Businesses must fundamentally alter the way they handle identification, permissions, and access rights on corporate networks.

Today, enterprises do not have a distinct boundary between themselves and the Internet, and so thinking in those terms is not helpful. Businesses should instead focus on figuring out how to extend cybersecurity to areas where people and data congregate.

Also Read: Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture: A Cyber Resilient Approach for the Modern Threat Landscape

One way to achieve that is to have zero trust. It incorporates an additional layer of assurance wherein users are given access only to data or documents they are permitted to see. And nothing else is accessible to them.

Many data breaches originate within the organization, either directly by employees or via threats that have infiltrated the network. Data exfiltration is fairly simple to execute if someone already has access to the entire network. Furthermore, the company might not even be aware of it if there are no data loss prevention systems in place. Zero trust addresses this by denying access to everyone and anything until identity controls can confirm their identity. However, if employees find it difficult with the cybersecurity solutions to get their work done, they will look for unofficial and insecure workarounds, creating significant shadow IT issues and opening up vulnerabilities for threat actors to exploit.

Combining Networking and Security

For cybersecurity to be effective, it must move to the cloud as a rising number of workloads do. It gives companies the flexibility they require to effectively safeguard how a location-neutral, modern, and hybrid workforce performs.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) enables networking and security to be delivered via the cloud and managed in one location. Businesses now have more control over who has access to certain applications and how data is used. SASE stops anyone from getting around access and data constraints in order to implement zero trust. Unmanaged, personal, and corporate devices used for work purposes can all be more closely managed by organizations.

SASE makes it easy for employees to adhere to a single set of cybersecurity regulations, regardless of where they are logging on and accessing data and applications. For instance, features like Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) represent a significant advancement beyond VPNs.

ZTNA can integrate with other cloud services, threat prevention, and data security to streamline and reduce the cost of security management for teams. Adopting a SASE architecture, even if it is done gradually, enables firms to streamline their operations and spend less on numerous separate point solutions because a typical organization has probably established a number of ad hoc systems and different providers to handle their security.

On the networking side of SASE, additional advancements in efficiency are possible. One of them is Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), a method for centrally coordinating and controlling connectivity for remote sites with less effort and time-consuming management.

Also Read: Achieving Successful SASE Migration with Modern SD-WAN

Through more effective, more reasonably priced local broadband connections to the Internet, SD-WAN enables employees working remotely or in branch offices to access corporate systems and cloud apps. The core function of Secure SD-WAN in a SASE strategy is to connect and safeguard the entire workforce on a large scale.

Businesses can better defend themselves by moving cybersecurity to the cloud. Management difficulties and expenditures are significantly reduced when only one tool is used to manage instead of several, and when consistent policies are enforced automatically. It is now time for cybersecurity to fit how people work.